Art Is You Quotes

#1. All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.

Leslie Fiedler

#2. One of the great things about art is you get to see what your concerns are, what those things tumbling around inside you are.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#3. That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Maurice Sendak

#4. My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

Mary Karr

#5. The dirty secret of art is you don't have to show people your bad writing. That's what we have the delete key for.

Robert McKee

#6. The one thing about art is you can't question it. Everyone is looking at everyone else to find out what's cool. No one knows what's cool.

Zoe Kravitz

#7. If you worry about how good the art is, you're never going to make your own art.

Eric Fischl

#8. One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in.

Brian Eno

#9. When you are learning about a martial art, it is about respect.

Jackie Chan

#10. I know it's superficial, and you can't measure art, which is supposed to be up to the individual, but I've watched the Oscars since I was a baby with my mother.

Kerry Condon

#11. When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

John Cage

#12. There is no need to run outside for better seeing ... Rather abide at the center of your being; For the more you leave it the less you learn. Search your heart and see ... The way to do is to be.

Laozi

#13. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#14. I remember saying to myself, those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that's what art is. Art is about being provocative; art is also about beauty and if you leave the latter out, the former doesn't matter.

Nikky Finney

#15. In my opinion in art nothing can go too far as long as you don't physically hurt people or animals. Art is there to push boundaries. I love it when my work freaks people out but it's all fake!

Tom Six

#16. Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.

Stephen Sondheim

#17. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.

David Coleman

#18. Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

Alex North

#19. The highest and best work of imagination is the marvelous transformation that it works in character. Imagine that you are one with the principal of good, and you will become truly good.

Charles Fillmore

#20. Cooking is an art, but you eat it too.

Marcella Hazan

#21. Art, like life, is really just a matter of how you choose to look at things.

Alexa Land

#22. Do you know how to read?" "No. It is one of the black arts." He nodded. "But a useful one," he said.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#23. There are some people who love being a something, but I also got the gist in the 60's when I grew up that you could be, in the art scene, very diverse.

Charlemagne Palestine

#24. Art is meant to provoke emotions, Avery. Its sole purpose is to arouse our senses, even if it disturbs. Even if it's ugly. Even if it fucking scares the living shit out of you.

Lara Adrian

#25. The real question is, Why do you feel as though that's emasculating? A man can't have a conflict? When you try to do art, it's how it lands on people, and hopefully some people will see it the way that I saw it, which is all of these awful choices come from the place of a man who's damaged.

Wendell Pierce

#26. When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art.

Judith Martin

#27. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.

Rick Riordan

#28. Ethan, this is my favorite moment, before all of my other favorite moments are created with a new client. You are my work of art, mine to possess, sculpt, mend, bend, and make beg for mercy. You will adore worshiping, pleasing and serving me." ~ Mistress

Ruby Madden

#29. Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes.

Julia Child

#30. A map is the dead body of where you've been. A map is the unborn baby of where you're going. There are no maps. Maps are pictures of what isn't.

Russell Hoban

#31. How to Draw a Picture (XII)
Know when you're finished, and when you are, put your pencil or your paintbrush down. All the rest is only life.

Stephen King

#32. Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

Temple Grandin

#33. Facility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.

Lilli Palmer

#34. Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good.

Cennino Cennini

#35. So the audience, at times, lets us know actually what is so special about the show that we can't even necessarily design or predict. Which is great. That's what you want art to be. You want it to be alive and to actually have a life in the way it's viewed.

Steve Zissis

#36. Observermanship is the art of giving the impression that you are with it even though you don't know Latin very well.

Robert McAfee Brown

#37. A martial arts practice hall, a dojo, is a place you go to practice being the best you can be. But the true combat in a dojo is not between one person and another as most people believe it to be. The true combat in a martial arts practice hall is between the people within ourselves.

Michael Gerber

#38. All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet
it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

Joss Whedon

#39. Art is a deception that creates real emotions - a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.

Marco Tempest

#40. Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.

Yuri Milner

#41. Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

Andrew Wyeth

#42. If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

Zephyr Teachout

#43. When somebody greedily comes along and thinks that they gonna snatch everything, and you have so many people that have not, the passion that drives me is trying to make them understand that they have to share. So, my art reflects that; the whole reason I do what I do reflects that.

Chuck D

#44. I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time - the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.

Elizabeth Berkley

#45. When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right.

Arne Jacobsen

#46. Thinking is an art because it requires you to listen to your thoughts and then do something with them.

Andrew Holmes

#47. There's a point where art is not subjective, and my example for that is Picasso. If you don't like Picasso, that's your problem.

Danny Huston

#48. Survival is an art. It requires the dulling of the mind and the senses, and a delicate attunement to waiting, without insisting on precision about just what it is you are waiting for.

Marilyn French

#49. Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#50. The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing.

Mark Edward

#51. All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.

Robertson Davies

#52. Still to this day, I am deeply satisfied when watching a guitar player who is connected with their art and instrument. GuitarTV helps you tap into that connection, and to each other.

Steve Vai

#53. What of Art?
-It is a malady.
Love?
-An Illusion.
Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
What are you?
-To define is to limit.

Oscar Wilde

#54. Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Charlie Parker

#55. The awesome thing about lettering - which is different from many forms of art - is that you can actually see your mistakes. There are sophomore mistakes that people do at the beginning that you spot everywhere. For example, a lot of people make 'W's by turning 'M's upside down.

Jessica Hische

#56. Songwriting is a very frustrating art form. You have to get on tape exactly what's playing inside your head

Michael Jackson

#57. Geniuses have a little extra something. There's that little something that you know is a little different.

Billy Eckstine

#58. I've been consumed day and night and noon, building beds in your tear ducts, planting lilacs and wars in your skull. I live in you now. This is how art erects homes in your body.

Erica Alex

#59. Half the art of ballooning is to make your crashes so gentle that you can fool yourself into calling them landings.

Richard Branson

#60. Art is a language. It's not a skill. It's not a stunt. It's not something that you just learn to do and put it down. It comes from the heart.

Wynona Mulcaster

#61. In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.

N.K. Jemisin

#62. Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.

Stuart Dybek

#63. Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

Anselm Kiefer

#64. The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#65. The result may be important but it's not the actual measure. The measure is the feeling you have made contact with something.

Eric Maisel

#66. [Who are the artists you admire, Surrealist or otherwise?]
Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Charlotte Salomon, Goya, Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley is not so much about the impossible as he is about freaks and deformities, but those are interesting to me too.

Audrey Niffenegger

#67. I've done art on my own, and I've also collaborated with other people to make art. And collaborating with other people is always interesting because you end up doing things you probably wouldn't do otherwise.

Kim Gordon

#68. Self-censorship is a lie to yourself; if you are going to be trying to seriously create art, to create literary art, and you decide to hold back, to censor yourself, then you are a fool to yourself and it would be better that you kept your mouth shut and did not speak.

Salman Rushdie

#69. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.

Kurt Cobain

#70. Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that - but that's the only way one can stay married.

Zoe Akins

#71. The key quality that anyone has to develop - a regular person as well as a warrior - is humility. If you don't try to develop humility, what you end up developing is pride, and that's destructive; it destroys yourself and it destroys the world around you.

Vladimir Vasiliev

#72. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.

Margaret Atwood

#73. Hiring people is an art, not a science, and resumes can't tell you whether someone will fit into a company's culture.

Howard Schultz

#74. Intelligent martial arts is not getting in battles and winning them. Intelligent martial arts is avoiding battles because battles use up energy, and you can get hurt no matter who you are.

Frederick Lenz

#75. The record business is dangerous to the health of bands and individuals, which is something I'm just now learning. But it's not dangerous in any of the ways people think; it's not that they try to make you compromise your art. That's not the problem.

T Bone Burnett

#76. If you should attempt to maintain that film is an art in conversation with a cultured, intelligent American, he'll just plain stop talking to you.

Ilya Ilf

#77. If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing - a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#78. Music is a universal art; anybody's music belongs to everybody; you can't limit it to race or country.

James Weldon Johnson

#79. For me, a record is valid when I actually hold the vinyl. Like, I've worked on the art for a while and I see the vinyl and I go "Ooh, it's an actual LP. How cool is that?" That's very sacred to me. You can't take that back, you know?

Ryan Adams

#80. Do what you love and own who you are.
Time is precious ad death is real.
So is Art: It defies them both

Galadrielle Allman

#81. What you produce as a writer is art. A voice that opens a vein and leaves the reader lapping at the blood that's been drawn.

H.N. Sieverding

#82. What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know ... I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.

Virginia Woolf

#83. Life is the art of finding or building a bridge with a great determination every time you come across a precipice!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#84. This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.

Ray Bradbury

#85. Everything in life is drawing, if you want. Drawing is quintessential to knowing the self. Art that survives from one generation to the next is the art that actually carries something that tells society about self.

Richard Tuttle

#86. As an artist, I think you always have to take care of yourself as a person probably even more than the average person because your body is so important to your art.

Josh Young

#87. Why is comedy the only form of the arts where people think they have to agree with or approve the content? You don't walk through a museum with a towel and throw it over paintings you don't like.

Jim Norton

#88. If art is the bridge between what you see in your mind and what the world sees, then skill is how you build that bridge.

Twyla Tharp

#89. Fashion is not art. Fashion isnt even culture. Fashion is advertising, and advertising is money. And for every dollar you earn, someone has to pay.

Gia Carangi

#90. You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.

Marina Abramovic

#91. Make an enemy of jealousy and envy. As fast and soon as you can ... . The art world is high school with money.

Jerry Saltz

#92. True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide.

Carl Jung

#93. We're supposed to strive for harmony, and that's what the art of tea is supposed to accomplish ... but harmony is very, very difficult to achieve in this country. Tea ceremony is powerless. But it's also not such a bad thing either. You should enjoy it while you can.

Koushun Takami

#94. But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

Charles Nodier

#95. I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.

Janet Echelman

#96. Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

Fran Lebowitz

#97. You are missing a key element to the story. Maybe the moral of the legend is that we are all carved, created, and formed by a master hand. Maybe we are all works of art.

Amy Harmon

#98. In a cement park across the street is this giant sculpture. It is a giant umbrella frame lying on its side. It's green. Stand under it, during a rainstorm, you'll still get wet - that's why it's art.

Peter Hedges

#99. You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid.
You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation
at high speed with total clarity.

Banksy

#100. It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

Jackson Pollock